Although not native to the new World, sugarcane had a big hand in its history, from the slave trade to the rise in diabetes. It is grown mostly in Brazil and the Caribbean, but also in parts of America's Deep South, where sugar is a deeply-rooted part of the culture, despite the misery of the crop's development.
Sugarcane and its derivatives would become foundational for Southern culture. It’s in the pecan pie and the gâteau de sirop and the corn pone. Poured on biscuits. Some fools — what the hell are they thinking — even put sugar in their grits. Women are expected to be sweet. So is the tea. William Faulkner praised drinking whiskey “cold as molasses” in Light in August and dissolved a teaspoon of sugar in rainwater from a cistern for his own toddy. Otherwise, he wrote, it “lies in a little intact swirl like sand at the bottom of the glass.” A Southern-born conspiracy theorist named Robert Henry Winborne Welch, Jr. invented Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies. (He also founded the John Birch Society.) Fullback Bobby Grier first broke the collegiate football color barrier during the Southeastern Conference’s Sugar Bowl on Jan. 2, 1956, when he took to the field for the University of Pittsburgh Panthers against Georgia Tech’s Yellow Jackets. Ella Fitzgerald sang “Sugar Blues” in 1939; Bob Wills of The Texas Playboys wrote “Sugar Moon” in 1947. Over three long days in 1969, the same year my great-aunt demanded filial kisses from me, The Rolling Stones holed up at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, in Sheffield, Alabama, where they recorded “Brown Sugar.” Those stark lyrics by Mick Jagger played on tight rotation last month as I snaked beside the Mississippi on River Road, heading west from New Orleans as the annual sugarcane harvest got underway.
In lovely prose, Shane Mitchell tells us about sugarcane: its history, how it's harvested and processed, the state of the industry, and its legacy at The Bitter Southerner. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Sheila1988)